The following assignment is my interpretation of the poem ‘I felt a funeral in my brain’ by Emily Dickinson, which was first published in 1896. Dickinson is an extremely well known American poet who has been described as ‘a nineteenth century mystic… recluse’ (Brooks Bouson, 2010:3), as well as a ‘great and original American poet whose enigmatic verse is a precursor to the experimental works of modernist and postmodernist writers.’ (Brooks Bouson, 2010:3). My interpretation and analysis of the poem will be based around the concept of sound patterning. The phrase sound patterning is best defined when broken down, as Gibbons and Whitely have done in their forthcoming work Style and Cognition; here they define phonetics as ‘the study of speech sounds’ and phonology a ‘the
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The most important perhaps was the use of iambic tetrameter - and the breaking of it. However Simpson (2010) claims that ‘the distinction between strong and weak syllables is relative and not absolute’ (p17), which is true in terms of all interpretation in that it is relative to whom is reading the text and their experiences and characteristics.
However, generally all of the sound patterns used connoted a negative experience, working down through the linguistic levels - discourse (rhythm and meter), lexis (onomatopoeia), and phonology (alliteration and sounds clusters).
Readers interpretation:
Using sound patterning within a text allows the reader to visualise what the writer is describing to them in finer detail, by incorporating the senses, for example the use of onomatopoeia allows the reader to make a link between a word, and something they may have heard or experienced in the real world. This suggests that sound patterning is an extremely powerful technique that can completely change how a reader perceives a
The most important perhaps was the use of iambic tetrameter - and the breaking of it. However Simpson (2010) claims that ‘the distinction between strong and weak syllables is relative and not absolute’ (p17), which is true in terms of all interpretation in that it is relative to whom is reading the text and their experiences and characteristics.
However, generally all of the sound patterns used connoted a negative experience, working down through the linguistic levels - discourse (rhythm and meter), lexis (onomatopoeia), and phonology (alliteration and sounds clusters).
Readers interpretation:
Using sound patterning within a text allows the reader to visualise what the writer is describing to them in finer detail, by incorporating the senses, for example the use of onomatopoeia allows the reader to make a link between a word, and something they may have heard or experienced in the real world. This suggests that sound patterning is an extremely powerful technique that can completely change how a reader perceives a